‘Threat modeling’ is a security risk assessment method to identify the security weaknesses (vulnerabilities) adversaries in caber-security will probably exploit to materialize their goals (threats).
The primary application of threat modeling includes: Threat modeling in software, Threat Modeling in API enabled (cloud) infrastructure, data center Infrastructure.
Threat modeling is one of the most effective ways to identify security flaws in application software design. However, threat modeling has not been widely adopted in enterprises software development. Here are major difficulties:
Effective threat modeling requires an expert (or a team of experts) who has deep understanding a combination of technological domains including software development, exploiting security weakness and technical remediation of these weakness.
Effective threat modeling requires expertise in the organization’s business model and therefore the risk profiles, technological stack and existing controls. Most of the threat modeling tools and methodology in market are inclined to derive threats to technological stack only (e.g, an web application) and do not produce contextualized threat model tailored for the organization’s business model and risk profile. As the result, the threat model produced are not very useful to the organization’s risk management.
Modern day software development life-cycle (SDLC) requires threat modeling as an automated on-demand service so that the threat modeling can be conducted at the pace of software developers. SDLC such as Agile and DevOps do not offer a clear integration point for security analysis (e.g, lack a clear gate to sign-off technical design) Lines between requirements, design and coding are blurry and they are often fast-paced. The development can scale up or down based on the business requirements. It is not very practical to have the security SME to stay engaged with the software development at all time due to the required resources and cost. However, the risk to produce vulnerable applications go up dramatically when security are not part of the software design.
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